I had this interesting thought which I am sure can be easily defeated but definitely points towards the success of WordPress.

I was searching the web for something inconspicuous as the “iWrap” and I came upon some interesting results. While browsing the results and then switching back to the search results page, I realized that the first page had at least three results that were either related to WordPress or were on a WordPress blog. I repeated the search for completely inane search terms and had at least one result show up on every search I performed from a blog that used WordPress as the blogging tool. I have had this happen in the past with various other queries but had not quite put two and two together. So my hypothesis is that a WordPress blog or a link that is somehow related to WordPress, shows up on the first page of results on every search performed on Google.

Do you have a search term or phrase that proves otherwise?

[EDIT] Since there seems to be some that do not, conversely, what percentage of search results do you think has WordPress in the first page of results?

I had a similar thought in the past, but experienced exactly the opposite today. My search was for a destination marketing organization or convention and visitors bureau using WordPress. Some great results appeared with a simple DMO or CVB search, but none of the relevant sites in the top 50 or so were built with WordPress. I was disappointed.

Most of the time it’s due to the tag/category system of wp.com. It ranks incredibly high. I had that same “boost” when i was hosted there a while back, at least for the stuffs that I’m interested in searching anyways.

Furthermore, I put a good amount of work in my blog postings and I feel very privileged that without using “search engine promotion services”, every single one of my articles has been properly indexed in a matter of days, in Google — that makes a world of a difference on my visitor count.

As such, thanks to WordPress for turning my articles into such powerful magnets for prestigious search engines, such as Google ; )

Good observation. It only means that WP as a publishing tool is well thought out both in terms of easy of use (hence the high number of users) and search engine optimization (proof supporting your experimental hypothesis).

Query: What constitutes a “page”? We don’t all use the same settings. For example, I set results per page to the maximum back when I was doing obnoxiously specific research for college, and left it that way because on a decent connection it works out fine and sometimes I still go further down the page. But some like to keep the page shorter and some just don’t mess with settings at all.

I have a ‘parental blog’ on my kids. If you search on the medical term ‘visallergie’ (dutch for allergic to fish) my blog pops up at number 4 (before official and portal sites). On my blog there’s only one post on the subject.

google is successfull because it’s constantly working against spam or unrelated content. The fact is that wordpress userbase is incredibly large. Plus: wordpress unique features makes it very easy to many types of users… people that builds the net.

We are finding that on most recent Google searches, many wordpress.com and blogspot.com blogs are being excluded from the top 20 or 30 results. I can find only a few wordpress.com blogs in the top ten for extremely relevant searches.

Hundreds of blogs that were ranked in the top 5 on Google for a couple of years have now vanished completely and only show up when you do a search that would have invoked the old “Supplemental Index” (now obsolete.)

If you search for the name of a very obscure blogspot.com or wordpress.com blog then it does show up in the results but for the most part they are excluded or demoted.

In a face to face meeting yesterday, I named some specific examples to several Google employees and was told that I was wrong and that they did not believe that was even possible.

I think Jason is on to something: there are odd results when you search for things known to be on WP.com blogs lately, as in things changed in the last two months. But generally the WP has the googlejuice.

I won a bet with a senior Drupal developer who didn’t think I could get to the front page of Google for the term “camel cheese” within 48 hours. Made it in seven (or less: I typed up the post, hit Publish, and went to bed; when I woke up I was #3).

With over 40.000 new blogs created daily and almost 1 million posts a day you wonder how wordpress got that hight? If you done this search about 3 years ago you would notice only “joomla, VB Forums, PhpBB” now you only going to get wp, blogger, typepad (not as much)

Hope this answers your question.

Oh and by the way almost every post I make its in less then 1 hour scanned by google. See Example Here
I posted 2h ago but its already scanned.

For me it would be an extremely unscientific 90% score, after searching for 9 random keywords (with the keyword “andreas” as the reference) and getting WordPress-based hits among the first 10 results in 9 out of the 10 searches.

Regarding the optimization power of WordPress (especially when used with a carefully designed theme), I wouldn’t want to use anything else. Common sense SEO at its best, I love it.

Heh, I like where you were going with this. There is no doubt that WordPress is very popular, and its patrons blog on a wide range of topics… At least we will nab all those search terms now that people have put them in your comments.

i agree with this! i have two blogs, one in WordPress the other one in Blogger and I syndicate the same post in Blogger, though with a “continue reading” link to my new WordPress blog, and when I searched the particular blog topic, my WordPress blog shows up first, on the second page (there are still those competitors of mine) and my blogspot site a few entries after my WordPress. It was a good decision I moved to WP.

I have the number one image and web result for the word “nerdy” as well as a bunch of other common phrases. I’m pretty sure it’s not the tagging, but the titles, alt titles for images, relevant copy, simplicity of the site, lack of ads and/or popups, abundance of posts and click-throughs once they are indexed on Google.

And I only hate WordPress when I go to upgrade it and something gets messed up for a few hours.

I observed the same, a post was found within the hour in Google. It lasted for only a good 24 hour at that high position. But when I modified my robots.txt this isn’t happening anymore. Heve to find out which line does the trick
I believe that it has something to do with the feed or the ping services.

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[…] Mark Gosh on the Weblog Tools Collection did his own unscientific research project and was kind enough to share his findings. In his “experiment” he typed in a keyword and took a look at what results were returned. In each case, the results returned a WordPress blog post on every Google Search. […]

[…] Niet nad bulvár a miernu iróniu v nadpise, no akoko?vek, ak: “While browsing the results and then switching back to the search results page, I realized that the first page had at least three results that were either related to WordPress or were on a WordPress blog. I repeated the search for completely inane search terms and had at least one result show up on every search I performed from a blog that used WordPress as the blogging tool.” Zdroj: WordPress on every Google Search? […]

About the Author

Mark Ghosh

An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.